Business communications are about completing a task. Significant time may be consumed in conversations setting up the context. Questions such as “What is the conversation about?”, “What tools do I need open?”, “What is my role?”, “What is my location?”, “What information might I need to answer a question?” define the context of a conversation. The closer a task's context is to the communication experience, the greater end-user productivity may be.
Modern communication systems such as unified communications (UC) systems combine various modes of communication (e.g. instant messaging, voice calls, video communications, etc.) and provide ancillary services like presence, recording, interactive contact lists, etc. Thus, single or multimodal conversations are ever easier to establish. However, with little or no context, even these contemporary forms of communication fail to save time and effort to users, who may have to manually retrieve, transmit, share, etc. documents, files, and other contextual items in addition to spending time to understand the context as a conversation is initiated. Furthermore, when conversations continue, even more time and energy may be lost in trying to capture the latest state of the context (i.e., any changes since the last conversation).